Harvard Business School, MBA Blog

Intel CEO Paul Otellini

One of the amazing things about HBS is how big-name speakers are on campus all the time. Intel’s CEO was on campus today to chat about the future of technology… small classroom, huge name. I think they picked a small classroom on purpose — he mentioned at the beginning of the session that last year when he was in this room, only 1/3rd of the class was full! Can you imagine that? CEO of one of the largest companies in the world on a campus with 1800+ business students and an empty classroom. Incredible.

It just goes to show how jaded HBS students quickly become. It gets even worse at times… I’ve been attending lots of events and info sessions lately, and it’s commonplace for these experienced, world-class students to just get up in the middle of an event and walk out of the room! I guess it’s caused by a combination of “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) and the consistency with which so many impressive people cycle through the school.

Anyway, Otellini was very entertaining. He gave the typical canned corporate speech, but where it really came alive was in the Q&A. This is something that HBS does particularly well… the questions from the audience were all first-class and really pulled some interesting points from Otellini. He was entertaining, too. I love that he started drawing a chart on the board in the middle of answering a question on Intel’s cost structure and said “assume this is a log-log graph”…

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